The Book of Revelation

THE BOOK OF REVELATION: WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

 A Tale of Two Cities

Recently, a brother of mine who is a serious student of history, asked me this question in a somewhat annoyed fashion: what is that book all about? Frankly, it’s a question I’ve struggled with for many years, even arguing for some time that it was probably a mistake for it ever to have been included in the canon of the New Testament.

But recent scripture scholarship has enlightened me significantly. So, in case you too are bewildered by the meaning of this puzzling and somewhat inscrutable text, I thought I’d pass on to you – in a very condensed fashion – what this piece of writing is all about and why it was considered important enough to be included as part of Sacred Scripture.

The following is a summation of the work of several scholars. None of it is original.

The word that is translated from the Greek as “revelation,” or, “apocalypse,” is the first word of the Book of Revelation. It is a word that originated as the accepted description of a very popular type of Jewish literature which appeared around 200 B.C.E. and lasted until 100 C.E. The word “revelation” or “apocalypse” has been defined as a type of literature “in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality.” The major Jewish examples of this kind of writing are 1 Enoch, Daniel 7-12, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and The Apocalypse of Abraham.

The Book of Revelation stands at the end of the New Testament. It was placed there seemingly for two reasons: 1. its subject matter has to do with “the end” – judgment upon the world, the second coming of Christ, the destruction of Satan, and the beginning of the New Jerusalem. “With Revelation at its end, the Bible moves from ‘paradise lost’ in the Book of Genesis to ‘paradise regained.’” 2. This book has been a source of significant controversy from its very inception until the present day. In fact, it almost didn’t make it into the canon of the New Testament. Consequently, this added to its late admission to the now accepted canon of the Bible.

As one scholar asserts: “Thus what to do with Revelation has been an issue for Christians for a very long time.”

The Book of Revelation was written by a man who calls himself John of Patmos. He is writing in the form of a letter to seven Christian communities in seven cities in Asia Minor. He is an otherwise unknown Christian prophet who was most likely born in Palestine. Schooled in the Hebrew bible, as many as sixty-five percent of the verses in Revelation echo or allude to passages from the Hebrew Bible. It is written as someone who has been commanded by God to write this book. It is a visionary experience which features fabulous imagery, symbolic numbers, allusions to the Hebrew Bible, and a great emphasis on “seeing.”

This book was written during the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian (81-96 C.E.). The author consistently uses the term “Babylon” to designate Rome and its brutal rule throughout the known world at that time. In Jewish literature of that time period, this name was constantly associated with Rome precisely because they were the second destroyer of Jerusalem. This book was also written not long after the horrifying experience of the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and the utter devastation of all of Palestine at the hands of the Romans.

The emperor Domitian was universally considered to be a tyrannical megalomaniac, although, in truth, some historians now dispute this claim. In his time, however, there was widespread oppression and persecution of Christians in Asia. The word “tribulation,” which is used repeatedly throughout this book, was a reference to active persecution.

From a purely historical point of view, it is easy to see now how terrified people were of the Romans and how desperate they were to find an escape from their oppression. For many, the only way out was for the end times to come soon.

For Christians, emperor-worship was common place at that time. Jews and Christians alike were shocked by that demand as well. This is a fundamental conflict that is apparent throughout the whole book of Revelation: the true worship of God and his Christ versus the false worship of the emperor, referred to as the “beast.”

John, the writer of Revelation, has an unequivocally negative attitude towards the Roman Empire and to the Asian society that reflected the values of the Empire. In John’s view, Christians were pitted unyieldingly against the evil empire. The political order of Rome was considered wholly corrupt to the point that it belonged, in John’s mind, entirely to the realm of Satan.

According to one scholar, John “not only cast Rome as demonic, but depicted Roman rule as oppressive and stressed the threat of persecution…. He not only urged the rejection of everything Roman: he firmly predicted the end of Rome.”

Apocalyptic groups tend to be sectarian. They see themselves as the “true remnant.” As one scholar writes: “John called for reform. He tried to polarize the Churches in Asia by claiming that there is only one proper Christian attitude towards the contemporary world. He was clear that it is wrong for a Christian to settle for any form of accommodation to that world, because the Roman world is demonic through and through….In fact, he firmly opposed the larger Christian community that had developed a modus vivendi with the contemporary social order.”

The ultimate purpose for John writing his “Revelation” was his concern for the Christian communities that existed at that time in Asia Minor. They were very small and quite vulnerable. Because of this, the “tide of the Roman world flowed steadily against them. What worried him above all was that there were among them some who felt that they might swim with the tide.” He wanted them to see clearly how mad this would be on their part!

Another scholar puts it this way: “His (John) was a firmly dualistic vision: there is a God, and there is evil. And Rome was wholly evil. Not all Christians saw it so.” The Pastoral Epistles of Paul, for example, “had come to terms with the world in which they lived. They were in fact to become model citizens of that world.” Historically, the Christian Church addressed by Paul in his writings followed the Pastoral model.

John’s view, then, is a minority one. He adopted a radical stance, just as many Jews at that time also did, such as the Essenes. John, then, wrote to and for the like-minded, and challenged those who would see things differently. “He viewed all authority based on power as demonic….Surely history has substantiated that John’s assessment of power-structures is not too wide of the mark.” John was urging his Christians to resist, to not settle for half-measures.

There are two ways of reading the Book of Revelation:

1) The Futurist Interpretation: “The central claim of a futurist reading is simple: Revelation tells us about what will happen sometime in the future. It has three premises: a. what Revelation describes has not yet happened in that the world has not come to an end and Jesus has not returned in triumph and glory. b. as the inspired Word of God, the Bible cannot be wrong. c. therefore, what Revelation describes must still be going to happen in a distant future – like in the present day.

This essentially is the basis of the “millenialist” reading of Revelation that flourished in the last half century with the books by Hal Lindsey and the “rapture” books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. This is the view that insists that the Book of Revelation was a message encoded in symbols that instructs all of us as to what the signs of the end of the world will look like and that will precede the second coming of Christ. Those “signs” are then interpreted in terms of present day tragedies.

2) The Past-Historical Interpretation: “This reading grows out of the belief that we understand the message of Revelation only by setting the text in the historical context in which it was written, emphasizing what Revelation would have meant in the past… As such, the text was meant to be a message to people living at that time and in that place, not a message to people thousands of years later.”

“The book itself indicates that John was thinking of his own time.” There is compelling evidence in the prologue, the epilogue, and the main body of the book that the author was writing only about the realities of his own day.” And only his own day!

To summarize, the message of John of Patmos involved three convictions:

“Despite appearances to the contrary, Christ is Lord; Caesar is not;

God will soon act to overthrow the rule of Caesar and his power;

Therefore, persevere, endure, be confident, have faith.”

As a prediction, it was mistaken. What the author expected to happen, and predicted would happen, did not happen. The world did not come to an end. Nor did Jesus return soon.

There are many other problems that Revelation discloses: a misogynistic attitude that describes Rome as the “great whore,” and the vision of 144,000 men “who have not defiled themselves with women”; a portrait of God as one who sends massive destruction upon the inhabitants of the earth; an emphasis on violence; and “the picture of God as an angry tyrant who plans to destroy the earth and most of its people.”

Nevertheless, “in this final book of the Christian Bible, we find the same twofold focus that marks so much of the Bible as a whole: radical affirmation of the sovereignty and justice of God, and the radical criticism of an oppressive domination system pretending to be the will of God.”

The domination system represented by Rome consisted of a “web of political oppression, economic exploitation, and religious legitimation. Elites of power and wealth controlled societies in their own interests and declared the order they imposed to be the will of God…. Rome controlled the world of the first century through a combination of seduction, intimidation, and violence….’Babylon the Great’ is not a code name simply for Rome; it designates all domination systems organized around power, wealth, seduction, intimidation, and violence.”

In his classic work, Engaging the Powers, the scholar Walter Wink opines that the Book of Revelation makes so radical a critique of domination systems that “Never has a more withering political and economic criticism of empire been penned.”

For John, this tale of two cities – Rome and the New Jerusalem – represents ultimately the tale of two lordships: God or Caesar. “Though John’s vision recalls the language of paradise, it is not a vision of individuals communing with God in an idyllic garden. It is a vision of humans living together in a city. And it is the opposite of life in the other city, Rome, Babylon the Great, the world of empire.”

The New Jerusalem that John ends his book with is highly symbolic, “with virtually every one of its details based on imagery from the Hebrew Bible.” In doing so, it “speaks of the deepest yearnings of humankind. John sees a ‘new heaven and a new earth.’ In this New Jerusalem the ancient afflictions of humankind are all gone: grief, pain, and death. ‘God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more’…. This, of course, is the language of apocalyptic. As such, it is enigmatic, metaphorical, parabolic. John’s concluding vision is perhaps best understood as the ‘dream of God’ – God’s dream for humankind….For John, it is the only dream worth dreaming.”

The “new heaven” and the “new earth” that the final part of Revelation promotes so strongly is captured in the promise that God will dwell among his peoples. A transformation is promised that will be beyond imagining. It will be so revolutionary as to be a “new creation.” It will include “a radical questioning of our present relationship with the world. The promise of a new world is, therefore, a profound questioning of our present relationship with the world. “We are summoned to metanoia, to a major conversion of heart. We are called to work towards a new world …. God has freely, from the start, involved humankind in his creation. In his plan, a new world for humankind can only come about with human involvement.”

To conclude, “John’s vision of the New Jerusalem has both historical and trans-historical elements. Indeed, its power as a trans-historical vision may be the primary reason that Revelation ultimately made it into the Bible. It speaks of the reunion of God with humankind, thereby overcoming the exile that began in Eden.” Now, it is possible for every tear to be wiped away. “It is difficult to imagine a more powerful ending to the Bible.”

Sources:

Revelation, Wilfrid J. Harrington, O.P.

Reading the Bible Again For the First Time, Marcus Borg

Engaging the Powers, Walter Wink

Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.